Economy suffers under Democrats
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David H. Edmunds
Albemarle County
Published: April 20, 2008
One of the hit songs in 1959 was by Dinah Washington, “What a difference a day makes!”
In a purely musical but political context, that favorite oldie-goldie should be updated and retitled “What a difference a year makes!”
Fifteen months or so ago, the stock market was approaching a record high, the economy was looking very strong, unemployment was at 4.5 percent, gasoline averaged $2.19 per gallon and public approval of Congress was higher than that of the president.
By January 2007, the winds of change had swept the Democrats into control of Congress for the first time in 13 years.
Since then, both the economy and stock markets have experienced serious retreats, unemployment has climbed more than 5 percent, gasoline is at $3.25 per gallon, leadership by Harry Reid (Senate majority leader) and Nancy Pelosi (speaker of the House) has been largely ineffective and public approval of Congress is not only below approval of the president but has sunk to an all-time low.
Against such an historic backdrop, we have two Democratic candidates calling for more change.
One (Barack Obama) wants change based on hope, while the other (Hillary Clinton) wants change based on experience.
Both candidates carefully avoid giving too many specifics or identifying funding sources for their changes, but bigger government and higher taxes for all Americans are a virtual certainty.
If change under either candidate is no better than what their party has given us since January 2007, can the country really afford more of the same?
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Reader Reactions
Posted by ( hbsmith22 ) on April 23, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Mr. Edmunds:
To think that the economic problems now facing the country are a product of recently elected Democrats in congress is a far-fetched notion at best.
I see the same trends in our economy that you rightly noted. But to place responsibility for this in the past fifteen months on a Democratic congress is to avoid the real causes of these issues, which stem from policy enacted long before their swearing-in. If you’re interested in viable solutions, you’ve got to focus more on the actual cause of the problems:
Does it seem more likely that Democrats in congress in the last 15 months caused gas prices to rise? Or that our cavalier (no pun intended) foreign policy and increasing consumption of a finite resource lead to this rise?
Did the Democrats cause the housing market disaster that has sent our economy into recession, or is that a product of unrealistic mortgages that were negotiated and signed years before the 2006 congressional elections?
I won’t pretend to place blame with one political party or another, and both certainly could do better. But the notion that Democrats have been given a chance to run the economy and recent economic trends show that they have failed is simply inaccurate.
Posted by ( noggi ) on April 20, 2008 at 8:08 am
I have long wondered why we voters insist upon returning the same senators, term after term, to their offices.
We reward incompetence with re-election.
Why?